Not listening in school
I was told to study. Advised to study. Forced to study, but I had no interest. School was a minor inconvenience that got in the way of my NES and then later my SNES gaming.

I would never listen in class, mostly because I could never understand the teachers explanation of a subject and I would get frustrated and bored. I later found out in my 20's that I was dyslexic, which probably didn't help but I can't blame that, I just had zero interest in studying and I was lazy. Completely bone idle. I Wouldn't do homework to the point both my parents and teachers gave up and they stopped even making me participate in class. My parents even stopped getting me up in the morning which, back then, suited me fine. More time to play Final Fantasy I thought.

Fast forward to being about 23 and working in a supermarket, stacking shelves with no qualifications. Not even a GCSE. Finally all that stuff my parents and teachers had been saying made sense. Long story short, got my GCSE's, then A-levels on a night course, went to uni and got my degree and now finally have some kind of a career.

Don't buy a wooden boat
"Buy" isn't quite the word. It was free. Free boat! How could anyone resist? The fact it had been sunk at the bottom of the Basingstoke Canal for 10 years was a minor detail.

Strangely, not everyone quite had our eye for a bargain. My boss at the time, vastly more experienced in all things boaty than I was, said it'd be a bottomless pit of money, time, and effort. Pah, said I and the couple of mates who'd chipped in to pay for it to be towed halfway across Britain so we could fix it, industrial-size bilge pump running all the time. We knew it'd take six months of solid work and some cash.

But we were ready for it. This is a historic 70-year old boat we were saving. This is Important Work and our priceless heritage yadda yadda would be better for our effort.

It's now even more of a historic boat. It's now a historic 83-year old boat. Because that six-month schedule was set 13 years ago and the ----ing boat has only just, this week, gone back in the water with a fully mended hull. After a significant five-figure spend, and countless lost weekends spent arm-deep in horseshit. Yes, that's how you fix wooden boats. You mix horseshit with boiling hot tar to produce a noxious substance known as chalico. I am, sadly, not making that up.

Still, we now have a floating boat. All we need to do now is build a cabin and install an engine.

On the eve of my first date, at the tender age of 14, my father gave me a single line of advice
"Always pull her chair out for her," he said with a lascivious wink.

My mind swimming with the heady dreams of sticking my tongue down her throat, I set off to her house to pick up my poor teenage victim. We went to the bus stop, we took a bus ride together, we alighted in town, both stiff with nervous excite and anticipation.

We went to a cinema. Then a McDonalds. Then the bus home. Every single seat we sat on was bonded to the floor. I didn't get my tongue down her throat, or my hand up her top. Thanks for nothing, Dad.
(Grrrmachinehad fun once. It was awful., Mon 19 Nov 2012, 12:17,
3 replies)

Smoking.
I never listened. I wish I had.

Smoking is shit. So is my will power. I have tried the gum, the patches, 'cold turkey', prescription meds, electronic cigarettes, hypnosis, NHS cessation clinics, the fucking lot. Epic fails.

I smoke 30 a day. That's about £11 a day that i set fire to, which is approximately £4k a year out of net income. I stink of tobacco, my wife hates it and at the age of 39 I have smoked for more of my life than I haven't. Even becoming a parent hasn't stopped me (although I would never smoke anywhere near my daughter and never in the house).

We all make mistakes, some of mine have been significant with long term consequences, but out of them all, I wish I had listened to the advice i received and never started smoking.

It's your own bloody fault
Sometimes, on occasion, it's not necessarily the advice of your elders or your peers that you fail to heed. It's amazing to think that despite nobody knowing you better than you know yourself, it can be absolutely impossible to listen to the voice screaming at you from within your own mind.

"Don't go around there tonight. You'll only end up regretting it!"

And so it was that after 3 days of merriment and copious amounts of booze imbibed that I sat and considered my Sunday evening options. The Grand Prix was finished, X Factor's as gash as it ever was and QOTW was turning over at such a slow rate that I feared it might've gone into reverse. What other options does a man have other than an early night? Until you're faced with that familiar call? "Are you coming out for a pint?" Just a quiet end to the weekend. Something to help quicken the journey to the land of nod before another manic Monday.

Then before you know it, a cheeky pint to close out the weekend turns into five or six pints that would normally serve as a non-hangover inducing sup. At that point having already ignored my own advice to have a quiet night I decided that there's nothing quite like a whiskey night-cap to close out the frivolities. Fast forward half a bottle of whiskey later, a couple of the finest hippy ciggies and it's time to call a taxi home which arrives at the very reasonable hour of 4:15am. Home by half past and then two and a half hours kip before the spectre of work looms large and the snooze button becomes both your best friend and a mortal enemy.

I've just started to come to my senses now having been at work for over 5 hours already. The sum total of my efforts have been 1x Sausage&Hash Brown sarnie, 3x cup of tea, 1x unreasonably long trip to the traps for a wee snooze and 1x entry to B3ta so it at least sounds like I'm typing something that could pass as real work.

It's certainly not the first time that this has happened but as I've advised myself many a time before, it'll definitely be the last...honestly Guv, it will!

"Don't jump that fence!"
Thus spake my girlfriend when I was eighteen.

It was my summer before going to university, and I worked at am amusement park. It was overall mind-numbingly dull, though working there did offer me a lot of people-watching opportunities. It's an interesting cross-section of humanity that frequents such places, from teenagers feeling the heady freedom of being away from the dreaded parents to young families with small children to middle-aged people reliving their days of rollercoasters and bad food. That part of the job I actually enjoyed, little bits of voyeurism into the lives of other people. I was all but invisible to them, just another part of the equipment, so I could watch them in their unguarded moments.

But that's beside the point.

One night I was out drinking with my co-workers from the park and our respective girlfriends. Someone suggested climbing the fence at about one in the morning, which sounded like a fun thing to do to our booze-addled teenage minds. So nothing would do but to clamber over the six foot chain link fence and go down the humongous slide up near the front.

The slide was probably about sixty or seventy feet high (about 20 meters for you metric types) and made of fiberglass with six troughs to slide in. There was a small slope at the top to get you going, then a very large drop followed by a rise, typically just enough to slow the rider to a reasonable speed by the end. You rode down in a burlap sack with a plastic coating to which had been sewn a chunk of carpeting for the bottom. The slide was waxed daily to give it a good speed so that people didn't get stuck partly down.

We grabbed our carpets and started up the stairs. One of the guys reached over and felt the slide. "Hey, it's all wet! The dew is on it!"

"No problem," slurred another. "Flip the bag over so the smooth side is down and hydroplane."

Brilliant! we thought as we climbed onto the top platform. We all put our bags in troughs and sat there for a moment, each working up the courage to be the first. Finally one guy let out a whoop and pushed off. He zoomed down the initial slope and got airborne over the main drop.

"Holy shit!" I eagerly pushed off and similarly zipped down after him. And got airborne.

The bottom of the drop slammed into me, pressing me flat. I flew up the incline, got airborne again, and crashed into the wooden fence at the bottom. Next to me lay a crumpled heap that was the first guy. "Ffffffuuuuuuu-"

A rumble announced the approach of the other guys. "Oh shit!" We both rolled to the sides just as more bodies hit the fence and collapsed into groaning heaps.

Utterly sober, we put the bags back and returned to the fence, which we had to climb in our battered condition.

Shouldn't have jumped that fence...
(The Resident LoonNot a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 16 Nov 2012, 12:44,
Reply)

Making coffee one morning, for the wife, I looked over and saw my then 5-year-old son reaching slowly towards the near-boiling kettle. "Son," I said, "don't touch that, it's hot. You'll burn yourself."He looked up at me."All right, dad."I turned away to get a spoon from a drawer, then turning back noticed a little hand once more reaching out towards the kettle, which by this point was puking steam all over."Look, son, you really mustn't touch it. It's boiling hot, it'll really hurt."Again he looked me in the eye and said solemnly,"OK dad."I turned away again to get the coffee from the cupboard."AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH! I burned myself!"Terrible father that I am, my first response was not sympathy, or even concern, but rather "Oh, for the love of...", swiftly followed by "Oh well, maybe that way he'll learn."

"If you climb the mountain, be up and back by noon"
A pearoast, but it all started with neglected advice.

At age 17, a friend and I took a month-long auto trip around the American and Canadian West. One of our stops was at Mt. Hood, Oregon. My friend was partly prepared for the icy summit, but I wasn't. He had an ice axe, but the best I could scrounge from hunting around the ski slopes was a bamboo pole. Neither of us had crampons.

Someone advised "if you climb the mountain, be up and back by noon," but we didn't understand the advice. That meant starting the climb shortly after midnight. We wanted our sleep, however, and started instead after sunrise.

One reason for the advice is, as happens on summer's days, the surface snow begins melting, but is still rock-hard right under the surface. The combination is extremely slippery.

Descending from the top around 5 p.m., my friend was able to control his slippery descent using his ice axe, but my bamboo pole was nearly useless for that purpose. I slipped, and slid. I was hurtling downward straight towards a crevasse (technically a bergschrund), which sported a 30-to-50 meter tall cliff, depending where you sailed off. Painful death appeared certain.

I aimed my descent and plummeted straight into my friend, who was able to arrest both our descents with his ice axe. I started cursing him with the foulest language imaginable, even though he had just saved my life.

A panicky young death is not a pretty death! After more scary sliding experiments that brought us closer to the brink, I discovered I could roll over, hug the snow, and stop on my own. And I could take tiny baby steps downhill. After an eternity, we got out of there. I would have kissed him, except by now our tongues and lips were all sunburnt, and neither of us needed more pain.

close your car window or that bear will smell us and attack!!!
I didn't believe her and it did smell us, but it didn't attack. Instead it ended up semi-humping the car...
(donald_semblance, Thu 15 Nov 2012, 20:51,
1 reply)

Never trust a fart
1995, a hotel bedroom in Swindon, I'm relaxing on the bed watching MTV after a day at work and a good dinner involving a lot of rich food and profiteroles.

They were nice silk paisley boxer shorts too, and I never wore them again. I had to bin them.

Advice?
- Never moon a werewolf - Never play leap-frog with a unicorn - Never eat anything bigger than your head - Never pet a burning cat - Never shit where you eat - Never order anything in "the chef's own sauce"

I used my mobile phone whilst on an aeroplane
and the fucking thing crashed. I had to turn it off and on again to get it working but I lost the text message that I was halfway through typing :(
(TheManWithThePlancussed your mum on, Wed 21 Nov 2012, 14:40,
4 replies)

"Don't pick the cat up he might bite"
"Oh but animals like me" is the response I always get as they scoop him up into their arms. This is usually followed by"But animals normally like me"as I'm prying him off their arm.
(FootOfTim, Tue 20 Nov 2012, 20:46,
2 replies)

"don't go near that pile of tarmac in the carpark!"
me and my sister both ignored this one. the result was both of us, stripped down to our knickers(the ones with the day of the week on them, no less)in the communal courtyard, being hosed down and scrubbed with butter by a very angry mother.getting tarmac off your skin really hurts.
(Smash MonkeyPedro's been watching raising arizona, Sat 17 Nov 2012, 16:44,
8 replies)